Lake Toba
by Woodswolf
Summary: A re-encounter after a few million years leads to more blood being spilled, and ultimately a new war. Spin-off series based on Marquis Carabas' Station Sequence.
1. Prologue

_(A/N): Well, I go over and read ten different wikis searching for information on velociraptor breeding habits (I know it's in one of the dinosaur videos my little brother used to watch), and find nothing._

_So, I don't care if this is unrealistic. Whatever._

_Just don't complain too much, okay?_

_Here's the real A/N with the important stuff:_

* * *

_(A/N): So, anyway, this story is based off of Marquis Carabas' Station Sequence. If you check out his profile, you can find the four fics in that series. Their titles are:  
_

_Wells Street Station (#1)  
_

_Promenade (#1.5*)  
_

_The Ellipse (#2)  
_

_Narodnaya (#3**)  
_

_I am assuming you have read all of these fics if you are reading this. This whole series is an AU companion series told through the point of view of a 'character' I pointed out in my review on **Chapter 11**,** Harbinger**, of **Narodnaya**._

_It's going to contain major spoilers for The Ellipse and Narodnaya at minimum and will also spoil each fic's plot(***). The topic of this first book was actually suggested by Word of God, and so I follow Word of God (****)._

_The end._

* * *

_**DISCLAIMER:** For those of you that are going to say it, here's an excerpt from a PM message Marquis Carabas sent me:  
_

**_There's not much I haven't already said,_**_ ..._**_, though I may as well point a few things out._**

_**1. If anyone asks you in a review or private message, you have my total permission to go ahead with this. The same answer will be given to anyone who asks me.**_

_So how about you just keep your mouth shut and avoid the humiliation? I, once again, don't own the Station Sequence. If I did, this would be canon. And everyone would die. (Still hoping on that one...)_

_The end. Again.  
_

* * *

_* __I'm either not using the events in Promenade for this series, or I'm going to lump them in as a prologue to **The Warpath** (Book Four of my series, based on 'The Ellipse. Not sure yet._  


___** Narodnaya, at the time this was posted, was still a WIP.  
_

___*** The AU Narodnaya, in this case, has a different ending, proved so by Word of God.  
_

___**** AU Narodnaya's ending is still mine. Even Marquis Carabas doesn't know what I'm doing with this, although he probably has some vague idea._

* * *

PROLOGUE: 65,000,437 B.C.

I'd always hoped for an ironic death.

Maybe it would come to me during the final battle.

I sink my teeth into the neck of a Beldam and jerk my head back as hard as I can. The neck is ripped to shreds, and the monster tries to scream in pain, but it can't, because it can't breathe.

That was _revenge_.

It felt _good_.

I've got a whole _army_ behind me. It feels good to be in _power_. There's the whole assortment - T-rexes, other velociraptors, stegosauruses, and so many more that I can't name all of the kinds.

The psychephages, as they called themselves, couldn't take us all down. We outnumbered them. The battlefield was also on top of a good amount of some kind of rock that they don't like, but as long as they aren't extreme shapeshifters, able to turn into smoke and back, we can take them down with our teeth and claws.

They call me the Stormcrow. I have the power to summon this chaos and the blood.

I want _blood_. I seek _death_. I crave_ despair_.

I wasn't like this to begin with.

I rip the body of a horla to shreds with my claws and begin to think of my past.

* * *

_My childhood had been mostly normal. I had learned to hunt faster than the other eggs, and, after a few months, killed them out of boredom and lack of things to do. They were stupid, the other eggs, and I didn't want to be related to them._

_Years passed. I quickly was able to hunt and kill some larger animals. The group I was in, five including me, still gave me the least action and the least prey. I grew angry, and had to show them I was strong._

_That was around the time I found the mysterious burrow in the ground._

_That was around the time I discovered my purpose._

_There was a newer, better, stranger world under our own - lots of prey, respect, blood, death, 'buttons' for eyes..._

_Then came the day they offered for me to join them._

_I slaughtered every single one of the fakes on my way out._

_When I came back, soaked in the blood of others, they praised me for killing off another pack by myself._

_They had no idea of the truth, of course._

_But I didn't care. I was accepted._

* * *

My eyes dialate. Darkness is falling quickly. I kill a weak (possibly a baby) coatl and move on quickly. I call triumphantly and the thunder answers me.

I pounce on a kimatine, another of the psychephages, and assist one of my fighters in killing it.

I look around.

I call again.

A thunderclap.

* * *

_I purposefully sought out their lairs from then on out, occasionally accompanied when I might have trouble._

_I only trusted one other with my confidance. They helped me when I needed it and didn't when I didn't and kept quiet the rest of the time._

_I grew restless and merciless._

_I killed them with no mercy, no apologies, no reconciliations. They just died, and I did the rest of the work._

_I killed more. I lived by drinking their blood alone._

_Then came the day that peace was sought, and I forced myself to agree._

_Who was their leader, anyway?_

* * *

I lead my troops forward, progressing into the shadows.

I call with the crowd. We are the storm.

I am the 'crow'... the symbol of death.

The Stormcrow's storm progresses toward the enemy, killing all with teeth and claw, seeking revenge for the fallen.

* * *

_He woke up a few years later._

_They pretended to fear him. I saw through their lies, but played along. They helped me summon an army._

_Then I fought against them._

_I swore him my enemy, their leader. His blood would taste the best._

* * *

I feel the fear from my troops grow stronger.

We are closing in on him.

The various groans are suddenly silenced.

I go forward alone, unfearing.

I see him.

His vine-like loop is held in his hand.

I know where my troops are.

I call.

_You will die,_ I think to him. _You will die when I kill you for killing others for killing. You are the evil._

It reads my thoughts.

"And why? You are the one that seeks the blood. You dared interrupt a peaceful existence... not I. I am doing as my nature tells me to."

_I kill for food._

"You like to think that, yes, but you kill because you lack enough sanity to only kill for food."

_I will kill you for food._

"That's _revenge_, Stormcrow. Come and try it."

I run towards him.

He is faster.

A claw - something - scrapes across my neck.

I bleed.

_You are my enemy. I will kill you somehow._

_I DON'T CARE HOW!_

"Alas, it's too late for that."

I die.

My soul has some unfinished business to return to.

I let it.

* * *

_(A/N): So, do you like?_

_Dinosaurs-versus-psychephages was originally supposed to be its own feature, as the only thing better than that would be dinosaurs-versus-Nazis, but, alas, I didn't think I would be able to put enough meat on it._

_Now you're getting a feature film about a volcanic lake in Indonesia._

_I know, I should have gone dinosaurs-versus-Nazis a long time ago, but that's for another fic.  
_


	2. Sundown

_(A/N): Sorry for this being a few days late! I've been so busy, as I had to do this project for a class, and then I had to finish another project, and I have to edit this video, and then... the list goes on._

_And on top of that, I had a draft for the first chapter written AND typed, but, of course WordPad couldn't save the thing! Of course not!_

_Fuck it. Moving on._

_Once again, I'm not a biology major. I don't want to be, either. No offense, biology majors, but if I did that, I would be expected to follow my dad's path and go to medical school for general medecine, and so I want to stay as far away from that as I can. I couldn't stand being a doctor (no matter how much money I would make)._

_So, after that long rant: I picked a suitable species (modern, but assuming the lifetime of the subspecies I've chosen is around 10 million years or so (Wikipedia can be handy, but its reliabilty is crap) it... could be accurate. Assuming Wikipedia is right about that, and that Lake Toba formed around 77,000 years ago in a giant, extremely deadly explosion, Sumatran [redacted] (Such a simple term... I love it) should have been around then._

_Read now. Okay?_

* * *

CHAPTER ONE: SUNDOWN

Lake Toba.

It's such a fun name.

Lay-uk Toe-bah.

It was the place where I would finally kill him.

He had been my enemy for a long time. Millions of years.

Ever since I first found the first lair of the first one I ever saw.

He had killed me once.

But I am a resilient soul.

He would come to kill me soon.

* * *

It was a new lake. Only a few hundred years old.

This body does not remember its creation.

My new body is better prepared for this battle.

More intelligent. Bigger. Stronger. Fiercer. Faster.

More dangerous.

I would kill him here.

I would.

His blood would taste good.

I look back at what I had assembled.

Their teeth gnashing, their claws shining in the little remaining sunlight there was in the cover of the jungle.

One hundred tigers, all like me.

I growl in triumph.

* * *

I sneak up on a snake slithering through the jungle vines. I rip its head off for fun, swatting the head away from me with my paw. I eat the body, slurping it down my throat.

I have alerted them.

I bear my teeth, anticipating the battle ahead.

I roar to the sky.

The enemy is here.

So is he.

* * *

As the sun sets, the bloodshed begins.

I bite the face of a kimatine and watch the blood flow.

I drink it and move on to a new victim.

* * *

I have brainwashed my underlings. They do what I say.

They bite to kill and drink their fill.

Rhymes are fun.

* * *

Many casualties have been counted on both sides.

There's not as many on our side as I would have thought – about twenty percent of our force can still fight.

They fight hard, the psychephages, but they do not fight hard enough. They fight to injure and not to kill; they need to make sure that enough of us are still alive so that they can feed forever.

I can't let that happen.

* * *

Sunrise.

The fight disappates, waiting for the night to begin.

Each side waits in the darkness of the jungle. An occasional unlucky thing may be injured, but otherwise the jungle is silent.

The birds do not call, the rivers run quieter than they are supposed to. The whole jungle is reduced to a silent, unmoving, dead landform, a twitch of leaves or the pitter-patter of small feet on the forest floor being the only movement.

I wait for more blood.

I wait for battle.

* * *

_In the jungle, the head of a snake begins to decompose._

_First the small insects come along, taking a look at and eating tiny bits off of the snake head. Its glittering scales slowly begin to lose their luster as it becomes a black, writhing mass, covered with black flies and mosquitoes and other evils that begin to eat its eyes._

_They get in its mouth and burrow through the roof, filling its nose with the congestion and heat that can only come off of hundreds of small, moving bodies, mammilian or not._

_Eventually, a bird, one of the many currently silent creatures in the jungle, comes along and takes the head up in its mouth, insects and all, and swallows it, where the head will begin a slow digestive process._

_The snake is gone._

* * *

_(A/N): Once again, sorry that this thing is extremely late._

_I hope you enjoyed all the same. There will be at minimum one more chapter for this installment, and then the real fun begins, where I get to go inside the Stormcrow and take a look at its insanity and how it influenced the characters without them knowing it was there._

_Two books from now I will have some fun._

_Four books from now... well, the ending of the final one is, depending on who you are, predictable. Marquis Carabas knows more than anyone about it, and he still probably doesn't know what's going to happen._

_Yes, it's going to be a fuckload of fun, but if I didn't have a reputation that would state the ending before I begin... then it would be more fun XP_


	3. Nightfall

_(A/N): I'm not a fucking biology major._

_Hey, have I said that already?_

_ALSO: Well, I happened to pass out for the first time in my life today. I don't want to repeat that - it was AWFUL. It was during a choir concert - 150 people were packed like sardines (my front was touching someone's back, etc.), and I don't think I had enough to drink beforehand, and the stage lights... thankfully, however, no one saw it but the people behind me, so it didn't interrupt the concert or anything.  
_

_But I couldn't move my legs AT ALL. It sucked.  
_

_I will never forget, however, what I said when the pianist (after the concert was over) asked me where I was (I had passed out on the last song, as it was the song where we were packed like sardines), I said that I was behind the stage, by _that door_ (the door leading to the exterior hallway near the auditorium)__, and she said that wit and sarcasm was a good thing to have after passing out a minute or so beforehand.  
_

_Anyway, why the fuck do people have to pass out from fucking heatstroke or whatever anyway?  
_

_Fuck humanity. Moving on.  
_

* * *

CHAPTER TWO: NIGHTFALL

The battle begins again.

The forces on both sides have dwindled to nothing, almost, but both still fight for the sake of fighting, both still kill for the sake of killing.

* * *

I wonder, for a moment, if all of this killing is justified.

I return to my task, shredding the chest of a horla with my claws.

I drink and forget.

* * *

I still fight.

I am the only one left on my side, beside two strong allies.

All of us are beaten and bruised.

All of us are bleeding.

All of us are covered in the blood of the fallen.

All of us move on, fighting together.

* * *

I am the last one left.

I decapitate the last of their forces and move on.

It's time to kill him.

* * *

_The snake head, barely digested in the bird's belly, poisons its carrier when the venom from the broken glands seeps into the walls of the stomach, into its bloodstream. The bird falls, dies, and rots._

_The bugs that were inside the head also all die as the broken glands drown them in venom and acid._

_The snake, no longer a beautiful creature with shining emerald scales, emerges from the decay rotted and broken, hollowed-out and zombified, sitting inside what is left of the bird._

_Eventually, the bird it is in is carried off by another predator to be eaten._

_A gaping, rotten hole in the side of the bird lets the head fall out._

_It is free._

* * *

_(A/N): There has been some major foreshadowing in this book._

_Over time, yes, it will open up and become more and more obvious – believe me, some of you (specifically, Marquis Carabas, as he knows the most about it, even though it isn't much) will know the ending long before it occurs._

_Now the fun part comes, of course: this last chapter, and then all the epic books beyond._

_I'm going to have to re-read Wells Street Station and The Ellipse, it seems… (Finally, I have a justifiable reason to do so… Yay!)_


	4. Midnight

_(A/N): Thankfully, this chapter doesn't involve much knowledge that I wouldn't know, like, for example, the species of the (assumed) jungles of Indonesia around the time Lake Toba was formed._

_So, once again, I'm not a biology major, and even if I was, I probably wouldn't know what I would need to know for this._

_Now that I'm finished with this rant, how about you read, so that I don't have to rant again?_

* * *

CHAPTER THREE: MIDNIGHT

I am prepared to drink his blood.

He is the last one left.

So am I.

* * *

Whatever happens here, no one else will ever know.

If I win, blood fountains erupt everywhere, leaving behind lakes of blood and disease and misery and death and blood.

If he wins, I get revenge.

Either way, I benefit.

He will lose.

* * *

He appears very thoughtful, in the same way that a leader studying battle plans appears thoughtful: that focused look in his eyes, that small, lopsided, evil grin on his face.

"I didn't expect to be seeing you again, Stormcrow."

_I want a taste. I want to make sure this was worth it._

"Someday, you may get a taste," he tells me, playing with his fingers, not bothering to look at a creature he thinks of as less than him. "For now, however, I suggest we end this – that we stop this meaningless bloodspill. Of course, you are a creature that cannot see reason, so I don't expect this to end."

_One of us dies. One of us lives. I live. You die. The end._

"I wouldn't count on that, defeated one. All you seek is what you can benefit from, and there is nothing to benefit from here. You want to say that you triumphed over me, so that I am powerless and out of your way to world domination, or whatever your primitive instincts' motives are."

_I want your blood._

"You really have to become less predictable," he laughs. "Do you honestly think that those simple motives can let you triumph?"

I lunge at him. He pins me down.

"Did you think it was that easy?"

_I want a taste._

"You'll get one eventually."

I see nothing.

* * *

Why was he so _stupid_? He only killed me!

I came back once.

I could come again.

_I will kill you._

Now I seek my next target.

* * *

_(A/N): Did you like?_

_That's the end of this book._

_Anyway, I'm completely finished with the final chapter and epilogue of the final book, __**The End**__._

_So, I'm happy about that, and I don't care what you think._

_So, let us move on to the next in the series!_

_The first chapter of __**New Blood**__ (if I choose to add one – not sure…) will be up in a few hours, or less. Give or take a minute or fifty._


End file.
